I have been “mistaken,” “misled,” “misrepresented,” and been “unaccountably in error,”
and am sorry if you have been offended

Friday, January 03, 2014

The Mainichi Revelations around the Chinese Prior Notice Regarding its ADIZ

Mainichi Shimbun carried
the biggest scoop of New Year’s Day as it
revealed—it has pictures!—that the Chinese PLA had given an explanation of the
Chinese air defense recognition zone (ADIZ) to a Japanese delegation including
government officials more than three
years before it was announced last November and had proposed coordination regarding
the overlapping areas, which, of course, includes the airspace over the Senkaku
islands. (The Japanese
version here, the slightly shorter and, on at least one material point,
inaccurately translated*English
version here.) The Japanese side declined to consult and the matter lay
there, till now.

This
most immediately puts the lie to the Japanese contention that it had not been
consulted. Okay, not quite, since the case could be made that the Chinese
authorities never made an official approach—this was the third meeting of a
working-level group—and the ADIZ was already in place at the time of the
meeting, but it still pretty much deflates one of the three major Japanese
objections. One of the other two, of course, which I consider is the more
important one, consists of the reporting requirements and the possible consequences
of noncompliance. (Actually, from a purely technical point of view, the Chinese
requirements probably make sense. But I can talk about that on another
occasion. I have my own views about the coverage of the Senkaku Island
airspace, but they are irrelevant here since this point is all but irrelevant
to the global community.)

Okay,
a lot of embarrassment there, but it still doesn’t make the Chinese ADIZ
arrangement acceptable to the global community. The real problem here is that the
Japanese leadership was not made aware of this fact when it registered its complaint
and, more seriously, the Japanese authorities had apparently not notified the relevant
US authorities of said fact**, forcing the US to share in what
appears to be Japan’s great embarrassment.

What
does that say about Japan’s competence as a national security ally? From that
perspective alone, this must be at least as damaging to the bilateral alliance
as Prime Minister Abe’s December 26 visit to Yasukuni. This should be a subtle
but career-altering event for many of the Japanese government officials who
took part in that fateful meeting.

If
anyone got lucky here, it’s the person who leaked the document, since the
Specified Secrets Protection Act has not yet gone into force. Yes, you; your
jail sentence will be short.

*
Specifically:

I indicate below where
the original and the translation differ with yellow highlight and the translation
adds words of explanation

その範囲について「中国が主張するＥＥＺ（排他的経済水域）と大陸棚の端だ」と具体的に説明し、尖閣上空も含むとの認識を示した。

…stated that it roughly
matched what China claimed as its exclusive economic zone and continental shelf
-- one way to define a
nation's ocean borders. The commodore clearly explained that the Senkakus were inside
this zone.

**
It is possible that Japanese officials did notify their US counterparts, in
which case the shoe will be on both feet, so to speak.

3 comments:

All good points. Anyhow the ADIZ wasn't the right theater of operations to confront China. One of the many reasons is that non-compliance requests to the civilian airlines puts them in a very tough spot. Unless they receive total criminal and civil indemnification from the government, they risk being sued if things go wrong.

Those were, after all, the days of the scheme of Hatoyama's East Asian Economic Community. Were people on the Japanese side so blinded by optimism that they didn't care? Also, did the Chinese not notify the U.S., and ROK?? Is it credible they notified the Japanese but not the other two? Wouldn't they also have warned the Taiwanese? And what about making things public - what does an ADIZ help if nobody knows about it? Very queer, the whole affair.

Those were, after all, the days of the scheme of Hatoyama's East Asian Economic Community. Were people on the Japanese side so blinded by optimism that they didn't care? Also, did the Chinese not notify the U.S., and ROK?? Is it credible they notified the Japanese but not the other two? Wouldn't they also have warned the Taiwanese? And what about making things public - what does an ADIZ help if nobody knows about it? Very queer, the whole affair.

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About Me

After graduation, Jun Okumura promptly entered what is now the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and stayed in in its ecosystem most of his “adult” life. Along the way, he had pleasant stops in an assortment of Japanese quangos (Japangos?), overseas assignments and government agencies. After thirty years, though, it dawned on him that he had no aptitude whatsoever for administration and/or management. Armed with this epiphany, he went to the authorities and arranged an amicable separation; to come out, as it were. He is completely on his own IYKWIAS, but he and the METI folks remain “good friends.” He currently holds the titles of “visiting researcher” at the Meiji Institute for Global Affairs (no, that MIGA) and counselor at a risk analysis firm that dares not speak its name. This gives him plenty of time to blog or make money on his own. His bank account says that he does too much of the first, and insists that he do more of what he calls “intellectual odd jobs”. He wants to be paid to write fulltime, or better, talk—where the easy money is—but that distinction has largely escaped him. He really should not be referring to himself in the third person; he is not that famous.